Blue
by prepare4trouble
Summary: A release of terrigen gas in New York has affected a small number of the population, transforming them into Inhumans. Foggy is one of them. Kinkmeme prompt.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N - Another Kinkmeme prompt. Prompt read:_  
 _So I know that there are a lot of "Foggy is a mutant" prompts floating around, but this one isn't about him having powers so much as Matt assisting him with an Inhuman transformation similar to the one we see Skye go through on AoS, and what kind of powers he might develop based on his personality and how he deals with not being human anymore._  
 _In the Marvel comics universe, a massive terrigen gas release from the Inhuman city turned an enormous number of New Yorkers into Inhumans, causing pandemonium. Or, you could follow up the AoS hints at the end of the season if you wanted that headed in a similar direction. I don't care how it happens, but I want to see the after-effects of Foggy becoming Inhuman._  
 _Does Matt enlist his old friend Mary Sue through SHIELD to help Foggy through it?_  
 _Does Foggy end up becoming Daredevil's new sidekick eventually?_  
 _Do the two of them try to keep it a secret? Can they, depending on how extreme the transformation is?_  
 _For some reason in my brain he develops empathic abilities similar to Matt's extended senses but for people's feelings which helps him bond further with Matt, but I'm not going to be too picky about the specifics of how the prompt gets filled. I just think it'd be an interesting story, no matter how it gets done._

* * *

Blue

Matt was woken from a particularly confusing and disjointed dream involving Daredevil and a courtroom, by the sound of his phone repeating Foggy's name. For a moment, he lay in bed, somewhere between sleep and waking, wondering why he had forgotten to switch the phone to silent before entering court. Finally, the world began to click into place, the sounds and sensations of the courtroom fell away and he found himself laying in bed. He reached for his phone. It was just as well, he was almost certain he had been about to out himself as Daredevil in the middle of a crowded courtroom.

"Hey, Foggy," his voice croaked slightly. He cleared his throat. "What's up?" He trapped the phone between his ear and shoulder and touched his watch to check the time. It was a little after six. Far too early for either of them to be awake on a normal day.

For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line, then he could hear Foggy breathing, too hard, too fast.

"Foggy?" he said again.

"Matt…" another deep breath. Something was very wrong.

Matt pushed the covers aside and got out of bed. "Foggy, what's going on? Are you okay?" An apprehensive feeling was brewing in the pit of his stomach, and he didn't like it at all."

"I don't even know how to explain…" Another pause. "Matt, can you come over, there's something… something… just can you come over? Like right now? Please?"

"Yeah," Matt told him. "I'm on my way."

He hung up the phone and dressed quickly in the first things that he grabbed from his closet, not even bothering to check the color labels inside. It wasn't important. Clumsy, panicking fingers fastened zippers and buttons and shoelaces and he was running by the time the door of his apartment closed behind him.

* * *

Matt knocked on the door to Foggy's apartment. Inside, he could hear him moving around, the sound of the TV, volume turned down low, Foggy's breathing was too fast, his heart was pounding. Matt knocked again, louder this time. The door opened slowly, just a crack, then Foggy retreated into the apartment. Matt pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside.

He could tell that Foggy was standing a small distance away, the signals his body were putting out spoke of terror and misery, and Matt had no clue what was going on. He pushed the door closed behind him. "What's happened?" he asked. The only things, the _only_ things he could think of that might make Foggy react like this were very, very bad.

"Have you seen the news?" Foggy asked. He moved from his position standing in the middle of the room and sat down on the sofa.

Matt shook his head. "I woke up when you called, I came straight here."

"Okay," Foggy took a deep breath. "Okay, listen to this."

The volume on TV the switched on in the middle of a news report.

"…Terrigen gas appears to have affected only a small proportion of the population. It is believed that the cloud had dispersed, moving in an easterly direction over the atlantic ocean. It is not yet know whether it will continue to affect citizen of other countries following the wide dispersal caused by current wind patterns, however it is expected to hit Ireland within the next three hours, closely followed by the United Kingdom and mainland Europe."

"What?" Matt asked. "What gas?"

"Terrigen," Foggy said in a low voice. "It's… they're going to explain it now."

"And our main news story this morning once again," the TV said. "A leak of terrigen gas from an unknown source has swept across New York during the night, resulting in the transformation of a small number of ordinary citizens. Authorities are urging anybody affected not to panic, to stay home and to ring the helpline number on the screen. It is believed that less than 0.05% of the population are affected, the police are asking for calm…"

Foggy pressed the mute button again. "They're calling them Inhumans," he said. "Apparently there's something in some people's DNA that reacts to this stuff, and when they breath it in, which a lot of people did last night, it changes them into something else. There was a guy on the news earlier throwing cars around."

Matt frowned. "It's turning people into mutants," he said.

"Something like that, yeah. Not quite, but, yeah."

"Okay," Matt took a breath. "That's kind of terrifying."

Foggy didn't say anything. His heart rate increased again and Matt heard him running his fingers through his hair nervously.

"Foggy?" Matt said. He already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask, but he had to ask it anyway. He had to be sure.

Foggy swallowed.

"Did this stuff do something to you?"

He laughed, but there was no amusement or joy in the sound, it was empty and hollow and more than a little frightening to hear.

"Foggy?"

"I don't think I got any superpowers," Foggy said. "I don't know, maybe they'll come later. All I know is I woke up like this and from what they're saying it doesn't look like it's going to go away. Ever." He took another deep breath. "Shit!" Matt could taste salt in the air. "What the hell am I supposed to do?"

Matt licked his lips. He sat down on the chair next to Foggy and reached out to touch his arm. Foggy flinched away as he made contact. "Foggy, I'm sorry, but I don't understand. What is it?" he said.

"It's…" Foggy paused. "I don't even know how to describe it. I look… Fuck. Matt, I'm blue."

Matt raised an eyebrow. "Blue?" He remembered the color, as a concept. It had been so long since he had actually seen it that is was difficult to bring an image to mind. Finally, he settled on a raspberry flavor popsicle. He could remember the flavor much more vividly than the color, but the color was almost there. It was not a shade that any living person should be.

"Sort of light blue. Sky blue, I guess you'd call it, you know, in a pack of crayons."

"Blue," Matt repeated. "But… really?"

"Yeah, Matt. Believe be, if I was going to screw with you I'd pick something much funnier than this."

If he was screwing with him, Foggy wouldn't be so scared. He reached out a hand again, this time not initiating contact, but waiting for permission. "Can I..?"

Foggy sighed, then hesitantly placed his hand in Matt's. "Go ahead."

It felt completely normal. There was no difference in the texture or the temperature of his skin, nothing to suggest that anything unusual had happened. "It feels the same," he said.

"Yeah, well believe me it doesn't look that way. Oh!" He flinched in surprise.

Matt let go of the hand. "Sorry, did I hurt you, or..?" "No, no," Foggy told him. "It's just, when you touched me. It changed."

"Changed to normal?" Matt asked.

Foggy shook his head. "No, God, I wish. No, to a kind of orange color. It's gone back now. What the hell?!"

"There was a number to call," Matt said. "On the TV, it said if you're affected you should call the number on the screen. Maybe we should…"

"Are you kidding?" Foggy said. "Would you call a freaks helpline? Ten to one there's some government agency at the other end of the line waiting to swoop in and collect us all up. I don't know about you, but spending the rest of my life as a lab rat doesn't exactly appeal, you know?"

Matt nodded. He could understand that fear all too well. "We should call Karen, " he said. "Tell her we won't be in today, make sure she's okay. For all we know, she could have been affected too." He pulled out his phone. "Should I tell her what's happened, or would you rather not for now?"

Foggy inflated his cheeks and expelled the air through pursed lips. "It's a bit too obvious for me to get away with," he said. "She's going to find out sooner or later, might as well be now."

* * *

Karen sat at the other side of the room staring at Foggy in amazed silence. Foggy's discomfort was obvious in both his own silence and the way he had slowly edged away from her for the past half hour.

"What does it feel like?" she asked.

"Freaking terrifying," Foggy told her.

"Sorry, I guess you would be… I mean, it doesn't hurt or anything does it?"

Foggy got to his feet. "No. But it feels a little uncomfortable the way you're staring at me like you think I'm going to explode," he said.

"Sorry," Karen said again.

Foggy shrugged it off with a bravado that Matt could tell he didn't feel. "S'ok. I guess I'm going to have to get used to it. Might as well start now. At least you're not pointing and laughing. There'll be plenty of that later on, I assume. Moms crossing the street to keep their kids away from the monster, that kind of thing."

"You're not a monster, Foggy," Matt assured him.

"Oh no? How would you know, you can't see it!"

Karen got to her feet and crossed the room quickly. "You're not," she said. She placed her arms around him and embraced him tightly, then planted a kiss on one cheek. "You're not," she repeated.

Foggy sighed. "Thanks. I guess. You know it's not going to be a great day when people can make you feel better just by assuring you that you're not a monster."

Karen drew back from the embrace. "Oh," she said.

"Oh what?" Matt asked.

"It changed again," Foggy told him. "Green this time."

* * *

"It's been three weeks," Foggy said. "You'd think I'd be used to it by now."

"Used to what?" Matt asked him. They were walking down the street, Foggy leading as he always had, while Matt followed half a step behind, cane swinging.

Foggy slowed slightly and turned to look at him. "Used to what?" he repeated, disbelieving.

"The… blue thing?"

Foggy snorted. "Did you actually forget?"

"No, of course not," Matt assured him. Foggy looked down at his arm where Matt was touching it. It was a warm day, bare arms were a necessity, even if they did expose more of his skin to public scrutiny. The skin around his hand began to turn from a relaxed yellow to the red of lies. He shook his head.

"Suuure, you didn't. Yeah, Matt. The blue thing. The stares and the whispers, the pointing from the other end of the street. All that fun stuff." The skin surrounding Matt's hand was in the process of turning back to yellow when it stopped and began to change to an angry shade of purple instead. "Hey, easy buddy, I hate it too, but there's nothing we can do about it, right? No point getting worked up about a bunch of dumb kids."

Matt nodded and the color eased to somewhere in between the purple and the yellow. It looked like a particularly unpleasant bruise. Foggy sighed. He could have gotten used to the blue. Well, sort of. Not really. But there was no way he was ever going to feel okay about being some kind of litmus paper for human emotion. The whole thing was too damn weird for words.

He sighed. "Come on, lets go get a coffee before work. Hey, new game. How many people do you think I can make spill their drink in Starbucks just by walking in? I'm taking bets, loser buys."

Matt smiled tightly. Purple again, not so dark this time. "Three?" he said.

Foggy shook his head. "You'll lose. I'm going to go five, I'm feeling particularly freaky-looking today." He turned a corner and headed toward the nearest source of caffeine. He had a feeling it was going to be a trying day.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N - There wasn't supposed to be a second chapter of this, but people over at AO3 requested and I couldn't resist. There may even end up being more.

* * *

Colors were problematic, to say the least. He remembered them, of course he did. Every memory he had from before the accident, every memory of sight, was full of color. The green of the grass in the park where he had played, the gray of the sidewalk, the street, the buildings, the yellow sun, the sometimes blue of the sky, fading to shades of red and gold as it set on an evening. He had never seen a proper sunrise, never gotten up early enough on a clear enough day, it was one of his many regrets.

But those memories were from so long ago now that it was difficult to apply them to the world he had come to know. The sidewalk was made of the sound his cane made as it tapped on the concrete or asphalt, the footsteps and voices of the people around him, the echoes reflecting from the buildings that lined the street on either side. The grass was less a color and more a fresh smell and a softer feeling under his feet. The sky was lost to him now, available only as a memory and an abstract concept.

Blue. The word felt peaceful, it brought to mind a summer's day. He wished he could see it, even if only for a moment. He wished he could tell Foggy he looked okay and genuinely mean it, because he knew that it was true.

"You're quiet," Foggy told him.

Matt blinked, pulled unexpectedly from his reverie. "Just thinking," he said.

"Anything interesting?"

He shook his head. "Not really. Old memories."

* * *

"It's got to be the worst superpower ever," Foggy said. He was slumped over his desk and stared into his handheld mirror. That was a new addition to the office, ever-present on his desk. He just couldn't stop _looking_ at it. Staring at the reflection of his face, looking down at his hands, turning them, examining the differences in the shade of blue between the front and the back. He wondered idly whether he could tan now, and whether doing so would mean turning a darker shade of blue, or maybe another color entirely.

Matt and Karen slouched in the chairs on the opposite side of the desk. The ones that should have been for use by clients, clients that had mysteriously stopped coming recently. Not that they had exactly been fighting them off with a stick before, but now they were barely making enough to pay the rent for the office space.

"I wouldn't say that," Matt told him.

Foggy glared at him. "The only reason you can say because is that you haven't seen it. Trust me, worst one ever. It has absolutely no practical applications."

"Sure it does," Karen told him. She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. The surrounding skin began to change to a shade of yellow. "See?"

Yellow was a neutral color. It showed that someone was relaxed or not feeling much of anything. he was happy to see it. It had taken several weeks for her to be comfortable enough with him for yellow. For a long time red or orange had been her default.

"Okay, invasion of personal space slightly. And that, right there, that's why we don't tell anybody else about this aspect of it. The last thing I need is for random people running up to me in the street and trying to touch me. Can you imagine?"

Matt smiled.

"And I don't know what _you_ find so funny about it," Foggy said. He turned to Karen. "He keeps forgetting about it."

"I don't," Matt said. "It slipped my mind _once_. And I apologized. I don't have a visual reference for you in the first place, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to alter it."

"Well, I wish _I_ could forget about it," Foggy said. "Actually, no. Because if I did, I'd have to find out about it again and I don't think I could go through that for a second time."

Matt stretched and touched his watch. "It's really not the worst power you could have gotten," he said.

"Oh no?"

He shrugged. "You could've developed a smell so bad that nobody could stand to be in the room with you. Or, what if you electrocuted anybody you touched, or what if you could read minds, but you couldn't turn it off and you just had to spend your entire life listening to other people's innermost thoughts until you went crazy?"

Foggy stared at him. "Are any of those real things?"

"I don't know. They could be though. This happened all over the world, there are tens of thousands of people affected. I'm just saying you're probably not the worst off of all of them."

"If you could see it…"

"…He'd be saying exactly the same thing," Karen said. "He's right, it's not that bad. I mean, I'll be honest, I don't envy you, I know it sucks, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Did you see that woman in the paper the other day? The one with the spikes?"

Foggy took one final glance in the mirror, then got to his feet. "Okay, you guys win. Not literally the worst thing that could have happened. You both need to learn the importance of wallowing in self pity once in a while. So answer me this, Mr Positivity, Miss Bright Side, what do we do about the fact that nobody wants to hire a blue lawyer?"

The door opened with a barely audible creak and Foggy looked up.

"Um…" said the man standing there. He was tall, African American, dressed in an expensive looking suit. He stepped into the room and allowed the door to close behind him. He turned around, revealing a long, muscular tail with what looked like a razor sharp tip. He flexed it. "The hospital where I work fired me when I turned up with this. Actually, I think a blue lawyer is exactly what I'm looking for."

* * *

"This is pretty great. We're the law firm of choice for every freak in the tri-state area."

They were relaxing with drinks after work at Josie's. He had actually meant that it was a good thing, and Matt was normally better than the average guy at picking up on the meaning behind his words. It seemed odd that he looked very disapproving all of a sudden. "You shouldn't say that about yourself," he said.

"What?" Foggy asked. "Freak?"

Matt nodded.

Foggy shrugged, then swayed in his seat. He wondered when a few beers had turned into shots. He didn't remember the exact moment. He thought it had been Karen's idea, though there was an equal chance it was him.

"I can say that now," he informed Matt. "That's a thing I'm allowed to do without people getting disapprove-y. Like how you're technically allowed to use all kinds of derogaflory words about blind people."

Karen began to laugh hysterically.

"I don't do that," Matt informed him.

"Yeah, I know. I'd kick your ass if you did."

Karen's laughter grew louder. "Derogaflory?" she said.

" _You'd_ kick _my_ ass?" Matt said. "Really?"

Foggy pouted. "Shut up, both of you. Point is, we're suddenly the hottest law firm in town to the more… unusual residents of the area."

"I guess being blue has its perks," Matt said.

Foggy held up his glass. "I'll drink to that," he said.


End file.
